It's true, of course, that every company is deeply reliant on its web of suppliers and customers, and it is common for a company to have a single supplier or customer that has enormous power over it. But I think you may not appreciate the impact of that situation.
FedEx might have a viable alternative to Boeing for repair parts, but not for planes, and more broadly I think you could make that argument about US airlines in general in the late 20th century: despite things like the MD-80 (before the merger) they really had no alternative to Boeing. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the net profits of US airlines in the late 20th century were almost exactly zero, while Boeing was and is one of the most profitable companies in the world. So far Boeing isn't squeezing FedEx that way, but not because it can't.
(I do note, though, that FedEx owns its own jets rather than renting them.)
But I think there's a different sense in which informatics are more core to FedEx than even flying. FedEx is a corporation, which in its essence is a set of business processes: relationships, practices, and information; unlike a 19th-century railroad, its physical assets like airplanes are relatively expendable by comparison. Historically, those processes happened mostly in people's heads, especially the heads of its managers, but today the vast majority of FedEx's business processes are automated, which means they happen in FedEx's data centers.
And whether those automated business processes happen at all, and how well they happen, is a matter of competence in informatics. Dan Luu argues convincingly that Twitter's kernel team has been key to their ability to execute in https://danluu.com/in-house/; FedEx needs not only data centers but a kernel team and a convex optimization algorithms team.
It's extremely common for companies that are deeply dependent on a single supplier or customer to end up either merged into that other company or bankrupted by the situation.
As for the country, when I set it up I'll be needing yeomanry regiments. You in?
FedEx might have a viable alternative to Boeing for repair parts, but not for planes, and more broadly I think you could make that argument about US airlines in general in the late 20th century: despite things like the MD-80 (before the merger) they really had no alternative to Boeing. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the net profits of US airlines in the late 20th century were almost exactly zero, while Boeing was and is one of the most profitable companies in the world. So far Boeing isn't squeezing FedEx that way, but not because it can't.
(I do note, though, that FedEx owns its own jets rather than renting them.)
But I think there's a different sense in which informatics are more core to FedEx than even flying. FedEx is a corporation, which in its essence is a set of business processes: relationships, practices, and information; unlike a 19th-century railroad, its physical assets like airplanes are relatively expendable by comparison. Historically, those processes happened mostly in people's heads, especially the heads of its managers, but today the vast majority of FedEx's business processes are automated, which means they happen in FedEx's data centers.
And whether those automated business processes happen at all, and how well they happen, is a matter of competence in informatics. Dan Luu argues convincingly that Twitter's kernel team has been key to their ability to execute in https://danluu.com/in-house/; FedEx needs not only data centers but a kernel team and a convex optimization algorithms team.
It's extremely common for companies that are deeply dependent on a single supplier or customer to end up either merged into that other company or bankrupted by the situation.
As for the country, when I set it up I'll be needing yeomanry regiments. You in?